Google's search business might not be as water-tight as people think it is

For every moonshot Google (now known as Alphabet) launches — self-driving cars, Glass, Loon — search is still the bedrock of its business.

Just under 90% of Google's total revenues in 2014 came from advertising, of which the majority was generated by search ads. Overall, paid search represents $70 billion, or 48%, of the $145 billion global digital ad market, according to eMarketer. Google dominates the overall search landscape, with 63.8% of the US desktop search traffic in August 2015, according to comScore. Its next nearest competitor is Microsoft's Bing, which has a 20.6% share.

But search is facing a huge challenge. The paid search business was built on a desktop browser model. And consumers are increasingly shifting to mobile. On mobile, consumers say they just don't search as much as they used to because they have apps that cater to their specific needs. They might still perform searches within those apps, but they're not doing as many searches on traditional search engines (although Google, Bing, and so on do power some in-app search engines.)

Speaking at digital trade show Dmexco in Cologne earlier this week, global communications agency ZenithOptimedia's chief digital officer Stefan Bardega and research company GlobalWebIndex's head of trends Jason Mander gave a mobile trends presentation. It was the slides on search that made the audience really sit up and start taking notes and photos.

Here's what they saw.

The number of people who say they use search engines to discover brands, products, and services is down.

ZenithOptimedia/GlobalWebIndex

The decline is significant: down from 55% to 49% in one year. For younger demographics, the change was even more marked. Bardega said: "For older demographics, the change is less pronounced. But the trend is there in black and white."

The caveat here is that this is a survey, not actual search click data. People may say they're searching less but we don't know what their actual usage is. But it's interesting to see that people say they are using search less now than ever before.

Why is this happening? ZenithOptimedia and GlobalWebIndex proposed three reasons:

1. Mobile behavior is app based. App usage represents 86% of time spent on mobile, according to Flurry.

2. People are discovering content through social. The top eight social networks drove more than 30% of traffic to sites in 2014, up from 22% in 2013, according to Shareaholic.

3. Screen sizes are small. It's more difficult to type out long queries.

Also, separate data from online research company comScore suggests that just 12.6% of all searches in the US were generated by smartphone users in Q4 of last year.

comScore

ZenithOptimedia's Bardega thinks the future of search could lie in voice commands. Google offers voice search too in Google Now, but it faces competition from the likes of Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Baidu's Duer in Asia, and the recently-unveiled Facebook M.

Voice search is growing.

ZenithOptimedia/GlobalWebIndex

ZenithOptimedia's analysis was based on GlobalWebIndex's data set, which covers more than 200,000 panelists in 34 countries, surveyed quarterly.

Search as we know it isn't going away anytime soon, but it is clear the industry is being disrupted. And mobile brings many more competitors than the desktop browser-based model — from apps through to device makers.

Bardega said: "Search in its current browser based format will need to evolve fast if it is to maintain its share of digital marketing investment."

We have contacted Google for comment and we will update this article if we hear back.